Rational Design: The Core of Rayman Originsby Chris McEntee

See article:gamasutra.com/view/feature/167214/rational_design_the_core_of_.php

[In this extensive design article, Chris McEntee, NHTVGame Architecture and Design student --who worked on Rayman Origins as a designer at Ubisoft Montpelier -- examines the company's core design philosophy and explores the techniques used to create the lauded platformer.]

PART 1:

"Form follows function" - Louis Sullivan

"Less is more" - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"Easy to learn and difficult to master" - Nolan Bushnell

In my time with Ubisoft Montpellier, I have had the honor of working with a handful of talented designers who are experts in the process of rational design. Over the course of my internship and specialization, I have tried to absorb as much information on this design process as I possibly could.

Paired with my extensive research into the subject, I feel that I have achieved a relatively decent grasp of the core concepts and have applied them in my own levels relatively well.

Through this article I hope to provide a solid base on the idea of rational game design, as well as some personal insight and examples of my own so that perhaps more people can start to embrace the practice and produce - hopefully - more entertaining and thoroughly satisfying gameplay experiences.

Conceived by Lionel Raynaud (Ubisoft worldwide content director) and Eric Couzian (Ubisoft game design conception director), and led by Olivier Palmieri (level design director on Rayman Origins), Ubisoft developed an internal Design Academy for training their designers in the field of rational game design. While on the development team of Rayman Origins, I was able to work directly alongside Olivier Palmieri in his task of implementing rational design methods in the development process of Rayman Origins and picked up a strong understanding of the methodology from him along the way.

Rational design is all about eliminating unnecessary information, making things inherently readable, understandable and apparent, introducing mechanics in an orderly and easily digestible fashion, and preserving the learning and difficulty curves of a game, known as macro flow.

In principle, it is best to provide a player with significantly interesting and deep mechanics that are well explored and exploited through clever rationalized level design, rather than injecting the game full of one-shot gameplay mechanics to feign depth. A good mechanic, such as the portal gun in the Valve game Portal, can carry an entire game by itself with the addition of proper gameplay elements to help emphasize the usefulness and depth of the mechanic.

We try, as designers, to overstuff our games with content, ideas and objectives because we think that makes it more clever or fun. I have come to understand the meaning of the three quotes at the top of this page, and fully believe in what they preach. When we rationalize our game systems and keep things simple but deep, we can truly create a good and meaningful gameplay experience that is also efficient for the team and easy to troubleshoot through iterative play-testing. I feel that rationalization is one of the keys to success in the game design field.


The pipes and platforms in the middle of the ravine are constantly falling, meaning there is no safe spot for the player other than the top of the mountain.

OBJECTIVE

For every game experience, a clearly defined objective or goal must be present; whether or not this goal strongly influences the player's actions directly is a different story, but the player must have a sense of purpose in the world they are traversing. In a platforming game like Rayman Origins, while there is a high-tier goal of "saving the world from darkness", there exist sub-objectives in every level that help to form a memorable and varied set of experiences throughout the game.

Even in a game such as Minecraft where the player has free roam to explore and build whatever he wishes, he has goals that emerge from the game system that drive his experience in the game universe, such as building a mega-structure or stockpiling resources for later use.

"…most game mechanics that don't feel deep enough feel that way because they have too many objectives and not enough meaningful skills." - M Stout, Game Mechanics:

Make your objectives clear and explicit, and clearly mark the path to the objective with meaningful mechanics. Simple manipulation of time and space conditions can emphasize or set forth a new objective; a falling object sequence makes it clear that the player must climb rapidly, else he will fall down a ravine. His objective: climb without stopping. This is not told to him by an NPC, this is not explicitly stated, but it is made clear by the situation he has been faced with.

Or take a different scenario where the player is in the belly of a beast, and he must escape before a column of fire burns him to a crisp; this is an objective, clear and concise, with clear consequences of failure, and gives him an immediate purpose: survive and escape. In the final section of this article, Motivation, it will become clear why the simple goal of survival works so easily in a game scenario.

Many times in Rayman Origins did we force the player to move by pursuing him with a swarm of enemies, so as to change up the pacing and keep him moving and give him a more immediate and pressing objective. The opposite is true as well; there are chest chase maps where the player must chase down a treasure chest to obtain the treasure locked away inside. While the gameplay result is the same -- the player must be fast and keep moving -- the conceptual objective feels different. The player feels a drive to catch the chest that he does not feel while being pursued by a wall of flames, but the objective is clear.

Objectives are all about what the player perceives as the purpose of his existence in the game world, and the feelings which the designer wishes him to associate with this experience.


While the simplest way to access this golden collectible is by using the nearby bumper, players can choose to use the helping hands move on the safe ground directly under it, and stack their way to the same height.

ATOMIC DESIGN

Atomic design, like the unimaginably small particles after which it has been named, is a very low level in game design wherein the designer examines the small influential factors and finds clear ways to harness their power in the pursuit of creating a learnable, balanced, fun and exciting experience.

One of the core principles of atomic design is considering at all times the required skills and inputs for a given in-game situation. By breaking down the number and difficulty of inputs and the complexity of the skills involved, it is easier to rationalize the way in which challenges are given to the player, keeping them from being stuck in a sequence which he cannot escape from due to the level of complexity required that he has not yet obtained.

Inputs such as holding down on the left analog stick and pressing the attack button, in that order, can actually be more difficult than a designer would instinctively think. Many players confuse the order of the inputs, or have a hard time simply managing two things in sync.

When we start to realize that some of our gameplay mechanics may be harder to execute, we think more critically about the frequency in which this mechanic is required, and find ways to best combat the barrier for entry. This is an example of breaking down and analyzing a mechanic which is the basis of atomic design; once we have deconstructed our mechanics into their base inputs and parameters, we can start to combine raw inputs to build new mechanics from scratch. By building mechanics in this way, we can more easily control the inherent difficulty to execute it and be better prepared for level design and defining the game system.

A game system refers to the balanced relationship between all the gameplay and mechanics of a game; the game system is, in essence, the game as a whole. Gameplay by definition is a group of mechanics that are related to the same subject, such as, for example, navigation, shooting or swimming. Mechanics are challenges that evolve in difficulty depending on the implementation of proper atomic parameters.

MECHANICS

A game mechanic is a challenge based on a specific input and skill which can be altered by atomic parameters to increase the inherent difficulty of the challenge. To successfully define a mechanic, we must first define a skill to associate with it, so that we know what shall be challenged. A player skill is not the same as a character's skill or in-game abilities; player skills are something separate from the game world entirely, and are based on physical, mental or social actions that, when translated into proper inputs, allow the player to overcome a challenge.

It is important to note that a mechanic by this definition is a challenge, and if no challenge is present, such as initiating dialogue with an NPC or accepting a choice within an interface, it is defined as an action instead. Mechanics are the critically important tools for developing good gameplay, flow and learning.

PART 2:

PLAYER SKILLS

Physical skills are some of the most common skills challenged in games; they relate to pure physical endurance, timing and split second reaction times. The only limitation when given a physical challenge is the actual ability to execute the mechanic in the way required. Some examples of physical skills include quick reflexes, good timing, gauging of analog controls and understanding of the metrics of various mechanics, precision and endurance.

Social skills challenge the player's ability to communicate and work together with other players; this is definitely important in a large multiplayer experience such as a massively multiplayer role playing game, but even in a couch multiplayer game like Rayman Origins, social skills can be useful and even challenged from time to time. Social skills include things such as cooperation with another player, leadership of a group toward a common goal, communication between players to either co-ordinate an action or debate on what to do next, known as negotiation.

An interesting use of the players' social skills in Rayman Origins is what has been called the "helping hands" mechanic, where one character can raise their arms like a pedestal for another player to jump on, who can in turn perform the same action for a third and so on.

In this way, through some social coordination between players on the couch, they can collaborate and create a stepladder to reach higher places without having to follow the otherwise predetermined path of the level.

Players who do not wish to exert their social skills and prefer approaching the problem in the default fashion have the choice to do so, but it is good to provide options for multiple player types.

Mental skills are brought into play for the more puzzle oriented experiences in games; things such as logic, memorization and association can be challenged and exploited to create a very complex puzzle.

Mental skills are not only limited to puzzles, however; similar to social skills, in multiplayer games like real time strategy, mental skills like management, tactic and strategy comprise a large portion of what the player is doing during a match. Mental and social can be combined in this scenario, as a player not only has to analyze and manage his own resources, but also consider those of his allies, and cooperate to defeat the opposition swiftly.

In deciding which skills we want to challenge and to what degree, we must break down the mechanic into its inputs and atomic parameters involved.

INPUTS

Inputs can be tricky when underestimated; many times a designer will take for granted the difficulty of a set of controls or an input type that is physically uncomfortable or difficult for a player. All of this must be taken into consideration when defining the inputs for each gameplay mechanic, and the difficulty of the input must be factored into the way the mechanic is challenged in the level design.

Factors that determine the inherent difficulty of an input include the number of buttons that need to be pressed simultaneously, or in sequence (and if in a sequence, how much time allowance is there between button presses to register the input as a success), the use of an analog stick along with a button input and the accuracy involved in the input itself. Take the most complex move in Rayman Origins, for example: the tornado attack jump. This is an move that requires four specific inputs:

Holding down the right shoulder button to initiate sprinting

Gauging the analog stick in the direction the player wishes to move

Pressing the attack button

Pressing the jump button immediately after

This level of complexity makes successfully executing this mechanic quite difficult in comparison to a simple sprint and jump, so if the designer is to challenge this mechanic he must take into consideration that it is difficult to execute, so perhaps the challenge itself might be slightly more forgiving to compensate.

ATOMIC PARAMETERS

Every mechanic contains at least one atomic parameter which upon alteration will influence the amount of challenge associated with the mechanic at that particular moment in the game. One mechanic can share multiple atomic parameters, though -- each having their own weight of significance on the challenge, but never in the same aspect as the others.

To fully explore the use of an atomic parameter, it is useful to study five differing values for each relating to difficulty: No influence on difficulty (simply written as ˩), easy, normal, hard, and impossible (simply written as ∞). By exploring the non difficulty case and the impossible case, we can more easily understand how a situation is affected when this parameter is either in full effect or no effect; if an enemy's scale fills the entire screen, then the atomic parameter for accuracy when shooting is ˩, simply because there is no possibility of missing.

This allows the designer to think of other ways to challenge the player to compensate for the ˩ of the accuracy parameter, such as forcing the use of stronger weaponry or having good timing based on a window of opportunity. Similarly, when a parameter is in ∞, such as an enemy having infinite health, it forces the player to take an alternate strategy for defeating them. With these five values, it is also important to quantify the parameters significantly, either in terms of metrics, percentages or times; there is no such thing as a vague atomic parameter.

As mechanics are defined by skills and inputs, and skills and inputs are influenced by atomic parameters, in almost all cases multiple parameters are adjusted when gauging difficulty of a sequence or element. A useful method of analyzing the relationship between all of these factors is to create a skills versus inputs matrix which plots skills along one axis and inputs along the other. At the crossing cells, the related atomic parameters can be found. As they relate to player skills and not in-game actions, atomic parameters should always be factorized; if the parameter includes some form of syntax from the game context to define, then it is no longer a proper atomic parameter.


An example of a skills versus inputs matrix. This is a good way to clarify the relationship between each input and how a skill is challenged by it.

Atomic parameters, while applicable to gameplay ingredients, can also apply to level design patterns. The earliest level design patterns presented in game should be the easiest combination of atomic parameters; the player must get past the initial hill of understanding the mechanics in an easily achievable environment before moving on to more complex and challenging sequences. By simply adjusting one atomic parameter, the difficulty of the same sequence could be changed drastically.

While many atomic parameters are injected in a static fashion, they can also appear dynamically to change up the rhythm or difficulty in an unpredicted and exciting way. One of the best examples of this form of atomic parameter in Rayman Origins is the King Lumcollectible which, upon collection, will temporarily turn all Lumsred and give the player twice the points when a Lum is grabbed. When the time runs out, the Lums return to their normal passive state. This alters the window of opportunity in which the player can complete a sequence filled with Lumsthat might have otherwise been in a ˩ state.